Plagiarism is the most sincere form of flattery, they say (or rather, this is said of imitation). In arts - literature, music, painting - it can at times be tolerated, as an artist might want to take inspiration from others, elaborate on an idea, or give it a different twist. In art it is the realization of the idea which matters.

Sometimes I think I am really lucky to have grown convinced that the Standard Model will not be broken by LHC results. It gives me peace of mind, detachment, and the opportunity to look at every new result found in disagreement with predictions with the right spirit - the "what's wrong with it ?" attitude that every physicist should have in his or her genes.

Spring is finally in, and with it the great expectations for a new run of the Large Hadron Collider, which will restart in a month or so with a 62.5% increase in center of mass energy of the proton-proton collisions it produces: 13 TeV. At 13 TeV, the production of a 2-TeV Z' boson, say, would not be so terribly rare, making a signal soon visible in the data that ATLAS and CMS are eager to collect.

In the morning of March 20th Europeans will be treated with the amazing show of a total solar eclipse. The path of totality is unfortunately confined to the northern Atlantic ocean, and will miss Iceland and England, passing only over the Faroer islands - no wonder there's no hotel room available there since last September! Curiously, the totality will end on the north pole, which on March 20th has the sun exactly at the horizon. Hence the conditions for a great shot like the one below are perfect - I only hope somebody will be at the north pole with a camera...

(Image credit: Fred Bruenjes; apod.nasa.gov)

The top quark is the heaviest known elementary particle. It was discovered in 1995 by the CDF and DZERO experiments at the Fermilab Tevatron collider after a long hunt that had started almost two decades earlier: it took long because the top weighs as much as a whole silver atom, and producing this much matter in single particle-particle collisions is difficult: it requires collision energies that started to be available only in 1985, and the rarity of the production processes dictate collision rates that were delivered only in the early nineties.

The XVI edition of Neutrino Telescopes is over and it is the time for some summing up – which I feel completely unsuited to do, as I was just an observer there. As you know, my field is high-energy collider physics, and neutrino physics has become a very different thing since the discovery of neutral currents 42 years ago. Anyway, I decided I would collect here a few random thoughts on the status of the field, as seen from my very skewed viewpoint...